The promise of AI is intoxicating, with opportunities to transform productivity throughout the enterprise. For many companies, it feels like a race, pushing to tap into all AI has to offer as quickly as possible.
But it’s important to remember the saying, “Don’t run before you can walk,” as it, in fact, pays to move a bit more methodically.
When it comes to generative AI, information management and content services are critical foundational elements that help organizations turn content into a strategic and competitive advantage—acting as a springboard to reimagine work and supercharge innovation.
At this year’s AIIM Conference in San Antonio, TX, we have four different learning opportunities to help you assess your organization’s AI readiness and see what’s new with content services to help you boost AI accuracy, data security, and operational experiences.
We can’t wait to see you there!
Opportunity #1: AIIM Solution Keynote—Great AI Needs Great Information Management!
April 4; 10:00-10:30am CDT in Keynote Theater, Texas Ballroom
As organizations navigate the future of work, efficiency is sometimes hindered by “digital friction,” the challenge people face in using technology for daily tasks. In this session, I’ll explore how generative AI holds the potential to redefine modern work—if organizations find the sweet spot between innovation and safeguarding information.
Discover why robust information management programs, based on sound governance principles, are vital to get the most out of GenAI investments.
Opportunity #2: Fireside Chat
April 4; 1:50-2:20pm in Crocket C
Join Ted Tomes, Director, Spatial Data & Document Control, and Gregg Greene, Digital Technology Engineering Advisor from Western Midstream, as they discuss the integral partnership between Document Control and Digital Technology in shaping robust information strategies for operational excellence. Discover how they utilize innovative technologies like AI to streamline information flow, enhance user experience, and prepare a future-ready organization.
Opportunity #3: AIIM Demonstration Session—Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Making the AI Pivot
April 4; 11:45-12:10pm CDT in Crocket A
Demand is high for automation and efficiency, with McKinsey calling generative AI “the next productivity frontier.” AI is not just another technology or business case but will shape what it means to be a company and how organizations address modern work challenges.
And the most exciting part, most organizations have just scratched the surface of what is possible!
This immersive session co-presented by myself and Tracy Caughell, OpenText Sr. Director Product Management, combines demos with practical advice, will help you propel your content services programs, using AI-powered automation to ensure the security, relevancy, and accuracy of your organization’s data.
Opportunity #4: See OpenText Content Cloud in Action
OpenText booth in AIIM Solution Lounge
This is your opportunity to discover what’s new with OpenText™ Content Cloud, our suite of end-to-end content management solutions. Stop by the OpenText booth to catch demos with OpenText product experts and see how to:
Power intelligent search and insights:OpenText™ Content Aviator, an AI-powered intelligent assistant, puts chat-based conversational search, content discovery, summarization, and translation right at employees’ fingertips.
Extend Microsoft 365 capabilities:OpenText™ Extended ECM meets employees where they work, integrating with Microsoft to bridge content silos and connect content to process.
Elevate content management:OpenText™ Core, an agile cloud solution, integrates with key business applications to boost productivity and accelerate business processes.
But wait, there’s more!
Maybe you’re chomping at the bit to fine-tune your AI and information management strategy and don’t want to wait until we’re together at AIIM24 to get started. We’re with you!
This session will uncover why smart information governance practices are essential for confident GenAI deployment and how to mitigate risk, while making information retrieval faster and more intuitive. Register today.
Ready to be off and running with GenAI to get most of your organization’s information? If you haven’t already, secure your spot at AIIM24. It’s an action-packed event you don’t want to miss.
Welcome to the February 2024 edition of our e-Invoicing & VAT compliance newsletter. This newsletter contains the most recent collection of updates to our real-time country updates blogs.
If you wish to keep abreast of the latest news from the OpenText Blogs page, navigate to “News & Events” and select e-Invoicing.
This issue, our Hot Topics section includes the news that Poland has postponed its e-Invoicing mandate, potentially indefinitely and address the question of what companies should do about this.
In “Compliance news and updates” you can read the latest world news on mandates as Malaysia moves towards their August 2024 mandate and Belgium’s mandate is back on the agenda for January 2026.
Meanwhile, we take a somewhat poetic look at the mandate in France and whether companies really need a certified provider or not – asking “To PDP, or not to PDP, that is the question”!
Hot topics
January 2024 – Poland’s e-Invoicing Mandate Postponed Indefinitely Due to System Errors
On 19 January 2024, Polish Finance Minister Andrzej Domański unexpectedly announced that the implementation of their proposed national e-Invoicing mandate had been postponed indefinitely.
This marks the second time Poland has postponed the mandate, having previously pushed it back six months from an original timeline of January 2024 to July 2024.
The KSeF system has been operational in a “voluntary phase” since January 2022, and businesses had been reassured by the Ministry of Finance that the KSeF system was ready for full implementation. This makes the recent discovery of critical errors and concerns about the platform’s ability to scale to the expected volumes of invoices all the more surprising. While the Ministry had previously claimed the system was capable of handling 100 million invoices per day, it appears that this figure may fall short of the actual demand due to peaks in processing on the first and last day(s) of each month.
Given the risk that businesses would be unable to issue invoices in the event of a system failure, the ministry has prudently decided to pause the mandate. A comprehensive external audit of the system is now planned to evaluate the issues and formulate a plan to resolve them. Only after the audit is complete and a remediation plan is in place will a new timeline be announced. The Ministry made clear that this will not be in 2024.
KSeF remains available on a voluntary basis
It remains unclear whether the Ministry will take this opportunity to address the already well-understood deficits in the KSeF system, such as the inability to include attachments with invoices issued through the platform. This common business practice is currently unsupported by the KSeF system, leaving businesses with the unenviable task of sending attachments separately via e-mail or other means, and buyers having to reconcile these attachments with the invoice received via KSeF.
Simultaneously, doubts have been raised about the compatibility of KSeF with the European Commission’s planned ViDA (VAT in the Digital Age) reforms. While ViDA has not yet been approved, it seems likely to proceed eventually, leaving Poland with a pressing need to adapt KSeF yet again to meet the demands of the reforms.
Although the Minister’s decision may be pragmatically welcomed as a step towards ensuring business continuity, it also comes as a blow to the many enterprises who have already invested in technology to connect to KSeF.
However, OpenText obtained confirmation directly from the Polish Ministry of Finance that: “KSeF still works in an optional version, and you can use it. Taxpayers can still integrate their financial and accounting programs with the National e-Invoice System.” In other words, KSeF is still available to be used on a voluntary basis as it has been since January 2022, and Polish companies can continue to roll out their e-Invoicing solution leveraging KSeF.
A unique opportunity to explore the benefits of e-Invoicing
As we all know, there are significant benefits in switching to electronic invoicing, in terms of reducing the costs and effort associated with manual invoice handling. This leads to faster payments, improved cash flow, and better customer and supplier relationships.
For suppliers sending invoices to their customers, there remains an obligation to obtain consent from your buyer to switch to electronic invoicing. However, the buyer does not need to establish a direct API connection to KSeF in order to receive their invoices electronically. They can register to manually download invoices from the KSeF portal in either PDF, XML, or HTML format. Multiple invoices can be downloaded together in ZIP format.
Buyers receiving invoices from their vendors can proactively provide consent in order to begin receiving their invoices. It seems likely that larger suppliers will be keen to proceed with automated e-Invoicing due to all of the business benefits.
OpenText Professional Services Community Survey can assist clients by finding out which of their buyers are ready to receive e-Invoices via KSeF, and which of their larger suppliers are willing and able to send e-Invoices.
Businesses should therefore see this as an opportunity, rather than a setback. As governments recognize the complexity of national e-Invoicing regimes, businesses too must understand that this is going to be more complicated than they expect. This is especially true for multinational companies with entities operating in multiple regimes affected by the impending mandates not just in Poland but also Romania & Malaysia (2024 mandates), Germany, Greece, Spain, and Slovakia (2025 mandates), and France, Belgium, Croatia, and Latvia (2026 mandates).
This wave of impending mandates will drive incredible demands on businesses to modernize and digitize their entire order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes in a very short space of time, and in a manner that facilitates far greater agility. An agile and robust global platform for electronic invoicing will be an absolute necessity in order to meet the requirements of multiple national mandates in a very short space of time.
Poland’s “voluntary option”, therefore, represents a perfect low-risk approach to trying and testing your e-Invoicing strategy and platform in advance of the next major mandate.
E-Invoicing & VAT Compliance news and updates
February 2024 – Belgium – e-Invoicing mandate back on the agenda and planned for January 1, 2026
Despite concerns that e-Invoicing would be off the table until late 2024, the Belgian finance minister has relaunched a legislative proposal to introduce mandatory e-invoicing for domestic business-to-business (B2B) transactions. The draft legislative proposal, adopted by the Council of Ministers on September 29, 2023, aims to implement the e-invoicing obligation on January 1, 2026.
The bill was approved by the Chamber of Deputies on 1 February 2024 and now awaits the royal seal and the publication in the official gazette. While Belgium still needs to receive a derogation from the European Commission in order to proceed, their application was submitted in October 2023 and there is no good reason to expect such a derogation would be refused. Still it remains an important milestone on the road to any e-Invoicing mandate.
What’s in scope?
The proposed B2B e-invoicing mandate includes all taxable persons established in Belgium and Belgian branches of foreign entities (foreign businesses with mere VAT registration in Belgium are not included).
Companies would be obliged to issue invoices in an electronic structured data format for domestic transactions in Belgium. The format proposed is PEPPOL-BIS UBL – which complies with the EU standard format EN-16931.
These invoices will need to be exchanged using the PEPPOL network or another compliant system agreed by both parties. PEPPOL was originally established for the purpose of business to government (B2G) e-Invoicing and although it has gradually been expanded for business to business (B2B) use cases it has yet to form the basis of a national B2B e-Invoicing mandate such as that proposed here so there is still certainly room for issues to arise during implementation of the mandate.
The PEPPOL network operates through certified Access Points which ensure data security, the integrity of transaction data, and the authenticity of the parties involved in any exchange. While companies are quite within their rights to purchase or build their own PEPPOL Access Point the model is mostly used through service providers like OpenText in what is effectively a “four-corner model” or interoperable model.
When the mandate goes live, sending of manual paper invoices, along with PDF invoices via email as well as other electronic invoicing approaches such as traditional EDI will no longer be allowed in a domestic B2B context.
This will result in significant disruption for businesses who have already invested in OCR technology or electronic invoicing solutions that rely solely on PDF or EDI.
What’s different from the previous attempt?
As we reported in our August 2023 update, political disagreements derailed the process previously – so what is different this time?
This time around, a single “big-bang” approach is being proposed with no phased implementation; the mandate would apply to all Belgian VAT-registered entities from January 1, 2026.
An associated e-reporting obligation is expected to be defined and introduced later, although most likely will simply be a straightforward 5-corner model as already used in countries like Hungary and South Korea, where service providers will report a subset of the invoice data to a government portal.
This is a very pragmatic approach, since, once the initial phase is over and all tax payers are successfully sending/receiving invoices and have reaped the benefits associated with eliminating manual invoices, it will be relatively straightforward to add the additional reporting step. If only all tax authorities took such a pragmatic approach that focuses first on the business benefits for taxpayers, before adding any additional burdens around tax reporting.
Be prepared
While we have seen high profile cases of countries delaying their e-Invoicing mandate the Belgian approach has been deliberately simplistic, leveraging the existing proven PEPPOL network in order to avoid potential complications around technical architecture and scalability.
Despite the seemingly distant implementation deadline, and the apparent simplicity of the model, businesses still start to prepare for the potential new mandate as soon as practical. If you are already using PEPPOL in Belgium, for example for B2G e-Invoicing, you may find there is less to do. But for those new to PEPPOL there is still some work to be done.
And of course Belgium is just one of many countries now who’s mandate will be coming soon. While Poland have postponed and no date has been set it will almost certainly be a 2025 deliverable, with Germany, Spain and Slovakia also due to begin their mandates in 2025. And 2026 will not only see Belgium introduce a mandate but also of course France, Croatia and Latvia.
For organizations with operations across these countries having to deal with not just one but two, three, four or even more mandates in quick succession will very likely leave you struggling for resources.
Beginning to address your global e-Invoicing strategy now makes a lot of sense.
February 2024 – Malaysia’s clearance e-Invoicing mandate – what we know so far
Malaysia has joined the increasing number of countries to announce a new mandatory e-Invoicing regime. As well as targeting tax compliance and reducing “tax leakages” the system will make tax reporting more efficient. In addition, the stated goals of the mandate include improvement in business efficiency and supporting the digital economy.
While e-Invoicing has been possible since 2015, it has been optional and not widely adopted. The new plans announced by the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (IRBM) for a Continuous Transactional Controls (CTC) mandate will be phased in over a period of years based on company revenue.
MyInvois portal – high level details
The Malaysian approach includes a central government platform, called “MyInvois” which will validate invoices; hence it is classed as a clearance model. The MyInvois platform will approve invoices prior to issuance and add a unique digital Certification Serial Number to the invoice. Once verified the supplier must share the validated e-Invoice with the buyer / customer.
Companies can either connect directly to the MyInvois portal or use their own application as long as it is able to integrate via the published Application Programming Interface (API).
For those with low volumes of invoices, connecting to MyInvois directly is possible. Here, invoices can be entered manually through a web form, or uploaded either individually or as a batch using a spreadsheet. The portal supports all essential e-Invoice actions, including invoice generation, submission, viewing, cancellation or rejection.
Cancellation/rejection needs to occur within 72 hours from the time of validation.
For those using the API option, this can be enabled either through an existing business application such as your ERP as long as it supports the API, or through a service provider. Invoices can be submitted in XML or JSON format.
There are 55 mandatory fields required under the new system as well as additional annexes for certain circumstances.
Invoices that fail to include the mandatory content or are not in the correct format will be rejected automatically.
More details of the functional and technical requirements can be found at the IRBM portal here.
Scope
The scope of the mandate will cover both domestic and cross-border transactions. Both imports and exports will need to be reported to the IRBM MyInvois portal.
Invoices, credit notes, debit notes and refund notes are all in scope of the mandate. Self-billed invoices are also in scope. There are some exemptions which are detailed in the technical specifications available on the IRBM Portal.
Timeline
The initial implementation date of the mandate has been deferred from June 2024 to August 2024 and slightly simplified from four phases to three. The timeline is now as follows:
For taxpayers with an annual turnover exceeding RM 100 million, the applicable date is now August 1, 2024.
For taxpayers with an annual turnover between RM 25 million and RM 100 million, the applicable date remains January 1, 2025. This simplifies the timeline by removing an additional phase which had originally been slated for January 1, 2026, for businesses with an annual turnover between RM 25 million and RM 50 million. These are now all included in the earlier date.
Finally, for all remaining taxpayers, the mandatory e-invoicing implementation starts on January 1, 2027.
February 2024 – France – To PDP, or not to PDP, that is the question
“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” The famous soliloquy from Hamlet is the crux of the hero’s dilemma. And it echoes the dilemma faced by companies operating in France today. The question at hand: to use a Partner Dematerialization Platform (PDP) or not for the upcoming French e-Invoicing reform.
Act I: The Mandate
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” In our play, the stage is set by the French government, which has mandated B2B e-invoicing and e-reporting starting from September 2026. The players of course are all of the companies who are operating in France and must adapt to this new reality.
Act II: The Choice
“To be, or not to be, that is the question.” To be a user of a PDP, or not to be? That is the question companies must ask themselves. The PDP, registered and authorized by the French tax authorities, offers more functionalities and flexibility than the public platform (PPF) or a regular, uncertified Dematerialization Operator (OD). It can process any EDI format, provide archiving tools, and offer specific business applications.
Partner Dematerialisation Platforms (PDPs) are government-certified e-invoicing service providers. They can issue and receive e-invoices directly with the service provider of the buyer without going through the Public Invoicing Portal (PPF). PDPs can convert e-invoices into standard formats such as Factur-X, UN/CEFACT CII, and UBL 2.1 to comply with European Union (EU) norm.
Dematerialisation Operators (ODs) provide similar functions to PDPs but are not certified by the government. They cannot directly issue or receive e-invoices. Instead, they must use the PPF as an intermediary to perform e-invoicing activities.
Act III: The Considerations
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” When choosing whether to use a PDP or not, companies must consider various parameters: the type of invoices they will process, data management concerns, customer/supplier relations, transmission methods, and specific features and functions that they may require. Cost will also be a key criteria, since service providers who certify as a PDP will have significant additional operational costs to achieve and maintain their PDP status.
It’s not a question of good or bad, but of what suits the company’s needs best.
Act IV: The Solution
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” OpenText are a leading provider of e-invoicing solutions and have applied for the role of PDP in France. The list of operators who have submitted their applications can be found on the French tax authority website here.
Of course, applying for PDP status is no guarantee of achieving it and the timelines for certification to complete are still a bit vague. PDP status will only be awarded after the interoperability tests with the public PPF platform are completed. However, as a global and profitable company hosting their own data centers and support infrastructure with the European Union, OpenText remains confident of achieving PDP status.
OpenText intends to operate both as an OD (Dematerialization Operator) and a PDP (Partner Dematerialization Platform) in France, recognizing that not all companies will need all of the features of a PDP.
We are also offering the OpenText e-Invoicing mandate readiness check service to assist customers in assessing the output from their ERP/finance/accounting systems to ensure it meets the requirements of the French legislation.
By partnering with OpenText we can help you achieve greatness in your e-Invoicing journey, and successfully navigate the “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns” of e-invoicing with confidence.
Act V: The Conclusion
“All’s well that ends well.” With the right choice of partner, companies can ensure a smooth transition to the new e-invoicing system. The question of “To PDP, or not to PDP” will be answered, and all’s well that ends with successful compliance.
For more details reach out to your OpenText account representative or contact us here.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is intended to reflect the direction the industry is moving and does not a reflect a commitment for the OpenText Active Invoices with Compliance (AIC) product development roadmap to meet any particular stated regulations.
LEGAL Disclaimer: The information contained in this newsletter is for general guidance on matters of interest only. The authors are not herein rendering legal, accounting, tax or other professional advice and the content should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional accounting, tax, legal or other competent advisers. While we make every attempt to ensure the accuracy of the information contained within is from reliable sources, OpenText is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for any result
In a world where environmental responsibility is no longer a mere buzzword, organizations are increasingly integrating carbon reduction initiatives into their operations.
To shed light on the current landscape of IT sustainability, OpenText commissioned Dimensional Research to conduct a sustainability survey of 300+ IT leaders and practitioners in companies across the globe.
We learned that 97% of companies have implemented sustainability initiatives (74%) or plan to do so (23%). IT is at the forefront of sustainability efforts, leading the pack among all departments, but companies are still in the early stages of IT sustainability adoption. IT’s main challenges are a lack of proper tools and expertise. While IT departments have a long way to go in reaching their goals, 41% strive to become net carbon neutral.
The 2023 State of IT Sustainability Report from OpenText reveals IT’s sustainability adoption rates, motivations to adopt, levels of maturity, obstacles faced, next steps, and regional comparisons.
As the leading equipment rental provider in Europe, Loxam offers construction firms everything from powered access systems to earthmoving machinery. We own a fleet of more than 600,000 items that enables customers to keep projects running on schedule.
We’re a business built on documentation—everything from contracts to quotes to invoices to equipment manuals to safety and compliance reports and spare part catalogues. Every day, our customers and internal business and workshop teams need to consult specific items before they start work on site or perform essential maintenance work.
Fast, reliable access to content is therefore vital to delivering great service. Today, OpenText™ Core forms the key component in our document workflows. Here’s why:
Overcoming legacy challenges
In the past, we relied on a legacy system to manage enterprise content, but limited functionality made uploading and retrieving documents a slow process. In addition, many of our workflows were paper-based—for example, we printed out two million customer contracts on paper each year and filed them away in our branches.
To take our customer service and internal efficiency to the next level, we looked for a new content management platform that would accelerate our document workflows. Looking ahead to 2025, we are also prioritizing environmental sustainability, so we were keen to implement paperless working as much as possible.
Reducing cost and complexity with SaaS
When we assessed potential solutions, Core ticked all the boxes. We wanted a platform that was easy to use and offered robust cybersecurity functionality, plus seamless integration with our ERP system. Using a SaaS solution is another major bonus, as this delivery model reduces our IT management and maintenance costs.
We worked closely with OpenText Professional Services to run two pilot schemes on the platform, before migrating data from our legacy system and going live in France and Denmark. OpenText Learning Services played a key role, too, running training sessions in French and English to get our users up to speed with the new tools. Gradually, we are rolling out Core across 8 of the countries that we operate in.
Boosting employee productivity with faster search tools
Around 3,500 people across the company are now using Core to manage and access content—including teams in our offices, branches, and workshops. The Business Workspace functionality in the OpenText solution is especially valuable, allowing us to organize millions of documents based on equipment type and brand models.
This, along with the powerful search capabilities in Core, has made it quicker and easier for our users to retrieve specific documents. In locations where we have gone live, we estimate that branches are saving an average of 30 minutes every week thanks to the OpenText solution—that’s time they can spend on more valuable work.
It also has a direct impact on our customers, who receive more responsive service when they contact us to check a safety report or to request a quote. That helps us to build long-term loyalty and ensure we remain their provider of choice for equipment rental.
Cutting carbon emissions with digital workflows
With Core, we are also well-placed to take steps towards reducing our carbon footprint. We are aiming to digitize two million contracts in the next year, which will free up space in our branches, and help to cut printing costs.
That’s not the only plan on the horizon. We will also offer customers online access to documents to make their lives easier. And we are exploring how we can give our technicians mobile access to the OpenText platform, which will help them perform repair work and get equipment ready for rental faster to drive higher revenues.
To learn more about how we’re optimizing our content management strategy and sharpening our competitive edge, read our case study.
About the author: Stephane Aldeano is responsible for Loxam’s digital transformation initiatives and technical teams as a Corporate Senior Technical Director. Previously, he was Chief Operating Officer and led the development of two Loxam subsidiaries. He has a degree in engineering from École Centrale Paris and an MBA from INSEAD.
At Salem Health, our goal is to improve the health and well-being of the people and communities we serve. Every time we engage with a patient, we want to give them an exceptional care experience.
Our patient care goals extend across Salem Health facilities and beyond. Throughout Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley, hundreds of outpatient and urgent-care clinics, skilled nursing facilities, and residential care homes rely on our laboratory and imaging services to help care for their own patients.
We have the busiest emergency department on the entire West Coast, 644 licensed beds, and hundreds of external healthcare customers. So, as you might imagine, our lab and radiology services are always in high demand. For Salem Health, the aim is to process orders quickly, accurately, and efficiently, so we can deliver test results to our stakeholders in the shortest possible time.
Fast data access for preventative care
Timely access to test results can make a big difference to patients. If a physician diagnoses a medical condition early in a residential care facility, they may be able to use preventative care to avoid that patient needing to be transferred to hospital or urgent care. And for patients, receiving test results quickly can remove days of anxiety and stress.
In the past, the main way to order lab test and imaging services from Salem Health was fax. While this approach served us well for many years, there were big opportunities for improvement.
In particular, manual processes meant that there was significant lead time involved in receiving orders and sending out results—and an ever-present risk of human error, which could add further delays. If we could streamline this work, we knew there was potential to cut our turnaround times substantially.
Looking for a new approach
When you use digital interfaces rather than manual processes, things move faster and there’s less room for error. We were in the middle of deploying Epic as our brand-new electronic health record (EHR) and laboratory information system (LIS). If we allowed customers to integrate their EHR with our Epic platform, we knew we could cut out the time-consuming manual processes altogether.
From the start, we knew it wouldn’t be feasible to manually build an integration for each individual clinic, urgent care, and skilled nursing facility. We needed another approach—and that’s when we started exploring healthcare interoperability with OpenText EMR-Link.
Building digital integrations
EMR-Link was the perfect fit for our needs. Because it’s a fully managed solution, we can avoid the time and cost of building hundreds of point-to-point interfaces in house—experts from OpenText Managed Services handle that work for us. And because OpenText has already built integrations with many leading EMR platforms, onboarding new customers is very straightforward.
Getting started with EMR-Link was easy, and we soon went live with our first customer integrations. Throughout the implementation process, the OpenText team was always on hand to support us—and since we went live over a year ago, they continue to hold weekly calls to make sure we’re getting maximum value from the solution.
Cutting turnaround times by 40%
So far, we’ve onboarded 270 local providers to EMR-Link. And when our customers switch to EMR-Link, the benefits couldn’t be clearer.
For example, we can now provide electrocardiogram results to physicians within just a few minutes, and data from imaging modalities such as MRI scanners in less than an hour. We’ve cut down our turnaround times for lab results by an average of 40%—and that faster access to information is already having a powerful impact on patient care.
In the last 12 months, we’ve measured reductions in length of stay, which reflects the fact that we’re helping inpatients to recover faster. We are also giving our healthcare partners the timely insights they need to use preventative care strategies for their patients, which helps some people to avoid a hospital admission in the first place. Our patients are noticing, too; in our latest annual survey, we saw an increase in patient satisfaction.
To learn more about how we are working with OpenText to onboard customers to EMR-Link, click here now to read our success story.
About the author:
Tish Lynn Gross is a Laboratory/Imaging Outreach Supervisor at Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics. A graduate of Washington State University, she was inspired to move into business development, which eventually led to her discovering her true passion for the healthcare industry—a career that has now spanned 25 years. Gross works to connect providers, clinics, and staff to their patients to provide excellent communication, resources, laboratory and imaging testing and results. At Salem Health, she has developed and implemented value-added strategies for laboratory and imaging services to increase profitability, expand market share and solidify client relationships.
The rapid growth of Microsoft® Teams within enterprises has led to unparalleled growth in content, with numerous Teams sites creating data duplication, document redundancy, and version control issues. As a result, content sprawl has become quite real quite quickly, creating governance challenges, user frustration, and productivity dips with content located across channels, chats, and emails. But it’s not all doom and gloom.
There is a way to tackle content sprawl and chaos, creating a productive environment to power modern work. By integrating content services with the applications employees use to produce and consume content, such as Microsoft® 365, organizations give users direct access to accurate content, prevent ungoverned content sharing, and put an end to the digital friction holding back efficient operations. Let’s explore how.
Understanding content sprawl and related challenges
Put productivity tools, such as Microsoft 365, into the hands of employees and you’d expect improved productivity, control, and connection. But that is not always the case.
Content sprawl has created significant content management challenges, with high volumes of disorganized content spread across expected and unexpected locations, making it difficult for users to find.
A recent Foundry survey sponsored by OpenText™ found that employees spend up to three hours a day searching for information to do their jobs. Adding insult to injury, 58% of organizations have lost business opportunities due to an inability to access data in a timely manner.[1]
While Microsoft 365 users enjoy easy document creation, collaboration, and communication, three challenges often hold productivity back:
Content sprawl: Employees’ options for sharing capabilities, such as OneDrive and Teams, lead to duplicate documents and process improvisation.
Process disconnect: Processes are disconnected from content and data leading to content siloes across applications.
Complexity and loss of control: Disconnected content spread across systems, applications, and even desktops, creates governance control issues, increasing data security risk.
Combatting content sprawl with modern cloud content management
With organizations facing varying degrees of content sprawl, along with varying stages of cloud transformation, it’s not always realistic for enterprises to move all content to the cloud at once. For many, a hybrid approach to corralling content and reducing sprawl is the best path forward, in which some information and systems are kept on-premise and some moved to the cloud, whether private, public, or hyperscalers such as Google, AWS, or Microsoft® Azure.
A hybrid architecture allows organizations to take a phased approach to moving content and processes to the cloud. With cloud-based content services, organizations get the flexibility to adapt to any infrastructure, moving at a pace that makes sense for the business.
Cloud-based content services provide a way to boost integrity, availability and accountability to all locations where content lives. By leveraging automation and integration across the information lifecycle, policies can be enforced across all content repositories and platforms. Plus, organizations can create flexible digital workspaces that enhance information access and value—giving users an alternative to creating ad-hoc Teams and other content locations.
This is done by integrating content within the lead applications employees use every day, including Microsoft 365, leaning on intelligent automation to ensure information is tied to specific tasks and workflows. For example, connecting SharePoint to ERP or CRM systems to organize content alongside business processes allows businesses to centralize content, people, workflows and tasks in one place.
Improving information governance to control content sprawl
With information constantly on the move and created wherever work is being done, such as within Microsoft Teams, the sprawl and chaos leads to unknown, uncontrolled, unsecured and unaudited content. With ungoverned content comes organizational risk—employees are uncertain they are working with the most recent and relevant content.
Therefore, information governance needs to evolve to support modern work environments, allowing organizations to take advantage of new collaboration tools while governing the ever-expanding amount of content and data.
According to Deloitte, effective information governance delivers a meaningful return on investments, in multiple forms:[2]
Generating incremental revenue through more efficient, profitable use of information
Reducing ‘hard’ costs by streamlining technology and storage needs
Saving time by enabling employees to find and use information more easily and quickly
From chaos to connected work experiences
By extending enterprise-grade content management deeper within the organization, and integrating content within already familiar interfaces, such as Microsoft Teams, employees get needed access and insights within the applications they use every day. With cloud-based content management equipped with governance controls, organizations can shift from content chaos to content connection, gaining tools to collaborate and share information across business systems and locations to help the workforce work better together.
As a result, productivity benefits are ripe for the taking, keeping users grounded in a consistent business workspace to break down information siloes, create empowered teams and reduce additional sprawl.
Ready to reduce content sprawl and deliver connected work experiences? Learn how to master modern work with smarter information.
[1] Foundry Research sponsored by OpenText™, MarketPulse Survey: Digital Friction, September 2023
[2] Deloitte, “The information governance imperative,” 2022
Application delivery management (ADM) plays a pivotal role in ensuring the seamless deployment, monitoring, and optimization of software applications. We’re well into 2024, and we can see the ADM field is poised for significant transformations, fueled by emerging technologies, evolving market demands, and heightened consumer expectations. Let’s dive into what we can anticipate in the realm of application delivery management this year and explore three essential trends your competitors are using to get a leg up.
Accelerate application delivery without compromising quality.
They are using or setting the stage for AI and Machine Learning in ADM.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are set to revolutionize application delivery management in 2024. Harnessing the power of AI-driven analytics, ADM platforms can proactively anticipate and mitigate potential performance issues, optimize resource allocation, and automate mundane tasks with unprecedented efficiency. ML algorithms, capable of analyzing vast troves of data generated throughout the application lifecycle, offer actionable insights for continuous improvement.
Expect to witness a surge in the adoption of AI-driven ADM solutions, empowering organizations to elevate application performance, reliability, and user experience to new heights. By leveraging AI and ML technologies, your ADM team can not only enhance operational efficiency but also unlock new avenues for innovation, driving competitive advantage—which could mean the difference between being in business and not.
They are shifting toward cloud-native technologies.
The momentum behind cloud-native technologies continues to gain traction, reshaping the ADM landscape in 2024. With your competitors increasingly embracing cloud platforms, ADM strategies are evolving to embrace the unique challenges and opportunities of cloud-native environments. Technologies like Kubernetes, containerization, and microservices architectures are emerging as foundational pillars of modern application delivery, offering unparalleled scalability, agility, and resilience.
Your ADM team might want to prioritize upskilling in cloud-native technologies and methodologies to effectively navigate the complexities of modern application environments. By embracing cloud-native principles, you can unlock the full potential of cloud computing, enabling rapid innovation, seamless scalability, and enhanced resilience in the face of evolving business requirements.
They are focused on security and compliance.
In an era marked by escalating cyber threats and stringent regulatory requirements, security and compliance take center stage in ADM practices in 2024. With applications increasingly becoming prime targets for cyber attacks, ensuring robust security measures throughout the application lifecycle is paramount. And your competition knows it. From implementing secure coding practices to conducting continuous vulnerability assessments and compliance audits, they are integrating security into every facet of application delivery management.
In addition, adherence to data privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is imperative for maintaining customer trust and avoiding regulatory penalties. Expect to see a heightened focus on DevSecOps practices and tools designed to embed security into the DNA of application development and delivery processes seamlessly. By embracing a proactive approach to security and compliance, your team can mitigate risks effectively, safeguard sensitive data, and uphold the integrity of your applications amid all the threat.
Keep an eye on the trends in ADM
This year promises to be full of transformation for ADM, characterized by the rise of AI and machine learning, the proliferation of cloud-native technologies, and a renewed focus on security and compliance, and your competitors are keeping up. By embracing these trends and adopting best practices, your team can navigate the evolving ADM landscape successfully and deliver exceptional digital experiences that drive business growth and customer satisfaction.
Learn more and find resources—including the Forrester® Research, Inc. predictions for application delivery in 2024—to help you master application delivery.
AI is bringing us into a new epoch of human society—it is a force multiplier for human potential.
OpenText is about Information Management + Data + AI + Trust.
AI also reflects its creators. We are currently at a critical point with AI. This is our moment to build the future that we want to live in.
AI can carry implicit bias and perpetuate unequitable power structures. We are on a journey to hear from a wide variety of voices and learn new perspectives on how to build AI that is sustainable, ethical, and inclusive.
As part of our celebrations for Black History Month, I recently had an incredible conversation with Karen Palmer, Storyteller from the Future, Award-winning XR Artist, and TED Speaker who explores the implications of AI and technology on societal structures and inequality. Karen won the XR Experience Competition at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2023 with her most recent project, Consensus Gentium, designed to drive discussion about data privacy, unconscious biases, and the power of technology.
I am thankful to Karen for sharing her powerful and insightful ideas with OpenText, and exploring with us the idea of decolonizing AI. You can read highlights from our conversation below.
***
Mark: As humans, why do you think we need AI?
Karen: The most important aspect or characteristic of AI is efficiency and speed. So, not about accuracy off the bat. It’s going to make things more efficient for you and it’s going to make it quicker for you. That’s a service they’re providing for you.
It’s all being driven around commerce, capitalism, and then the other side of it is surveillance. Like when Charles was crowned king, that was when they kicked in the most complicated and far-reaching AI system, facial recognition system, that’s ever been in England.
You and I may think, “hey, do I need AI?” But we haven’t got a choice in what’s happening today, because it’s being suggested to us.
My view on smart cities is that I really call them “surveillance cities,” because everything is sold to us as “it’s going to be more efficient, speedy, and make our life more safe.” But what it does is that it brings in more measures of security.
So, for example, Robert Williams in Detroit was the first person arrested by the facial recognition system that got it wrong. That was a system called Project Greenlight, and it was presented to the city of Detroit and recommended because there was so much crime. That if they put this surveillance grid in there, it would be better for fighting crime, to keep them safer. And what happened is that it’s now surveilling people and arresting people of color and they can’t dismantle that system. It’s here now.
So we have to be very aware of what is being sold to us and how we would like to use it. And by “us,” I mean all people. It might impact people of color or black people or women or minorities first, but it’s going to impact all of us eventually.
Mark: Thank you for sharing that. We’re here to challenge ourselves today. You used this expression, “chains of colonial algorithms,” and you also used a term, “decolonizing AI.” I’d love to hear your voice on what does that mean to you and what should we take away from that?
Karen: I’ve been looking at bias in AI since 2016-2017. But the deeper I go into it, the more I feel that maybe that term is a little bit of an understatement. That we really need to look at decolonizing AI and dismantling the colonial biases which are deeply embedded within these artificial intelligence systems— which are built on historical injustices and dominance and prejudices—and really enable different types of code to be brought to the forefront, such as Indigenous AI.
Let’s create AI systems from an Indigenous perspective, from a different cultural lens, from an African lens, or Hawaiian lens, or a Māori lens. Not coming at it like, “okay, you’ve got to be diverse for the quota of diversity.” This will make systems better for everybody.
What about building solutions from us, the people? What would that look like? How would we actually go around decolonizing society? How would we go around decolonizing AI, and what would that look like? And that’s my work that I’m embarking on.
Mark: So, to bring in wider data sets that express a full picture of society, is that another way to say it?
Karen: Yes! Holistic. Total. Authentic. Representative. Something which is reflective and authentic of the world in which we live.
Mark: OpenAI is in the news almost every day, and they announced recently their video generator called Sora. Some of the early imagery is phenomenal. Google recently announced that it is pausing image generation. Inaccurate historical context was coming out of Google.
I’d welcome your thoughts.
Karen: Let me just backtrack a little, with the writers’ strike in America. That happened because Hollywood and the studios were exploiting people’s rights. Their data, their digital data, their digital identity.
Everybody is nervous about AI taking their jobs, wherever you are, whether you’re a driver, whether you’re an artist like myself. AI is reflective of society.
So with the writers’ strike, the studios tend to be quite exploitative of talent. What they were trying to implement through the contracts was also exploitative. So it’s very important for our society to reflect the best part of ourselves, because the Algorithm will automate whatever we train it.
Technology reinforces inequality. And when it does that, it’s not a glitch. It’s a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. And so, as we’re moving forward in this ever-changing world to whatever role is being lost and whatever jobs are being discovered, it’s really important that it’s a world which is accessible for all of us.
And in terms of Gemini AI, that was the other extreme of bias in AI, where it was too diverse. There were Nazis, where they generated images that were Asian women or Black men. So it wasn’t historically accurate. So that’s why they paused it.
There’s got to be this middle ground—we’ve gone too far one way in terms of bias and too far one way regarding data sets in terms of diversity—to find something which is more representative.
And that again, is probably where the Indigenous AI and that decolonizing will create a bit more of an authentic representation.
Mark: Yeah, I don’t know how one really regulates it or oversees it. Other than the market going, “good tool / bad tool.” Where is that authentic voice to say, “this whole market’s moving in the right direction?”
Karen: That position of good or bad, that just comes down to perspective. That’s why we’re going to move into the age of perception and greater understanding. Because we’re in a time now of real division, and we’ve got to understand that what you may deem good, someone else might deem bad.
And that’s why, by democratizing more AI, more people can develop their own, more independent systems. So that people can have and code whatever they need to. They’re not dependent on a body doing it. Like, say, Joe Biden, two weeks ago. They’ve announced this organization now that’s going to regulate AI. But we don’t really know whose interest they’re actually going to represent, because there’s this history of governments and big business working together.
So that’s why what’s good for someone may not be good for you. It’s about us having a seat at the table of what’s happening.
Mark: Look 5-10 years out in AI. Love to hear your view of how the next few years play out in the world of AI.
Karen Discusses Her View of What’s Next from the Perspective of a Time Traveler from the Future
***
Karen invites us to envision a future where we have already created the world we would like to live in, using technology. What does it look like? Now, work backwards. What steps do we need to take today to get there?
I was inspired by her words: “The future is not something that happens to us. It’s something which we build together.”
I believe AI will be a force multiplier for human potential. To realize this, AI must be combined with our capacity for compassion, justice, and ethical behavior—our humanity, in a nutshell. AI will herald a new era of prosperity if—and only if—we prioritize the humanist impact of technology. Let’s apply AI for the betterment of our world and use it to help us solve our greatest, most pressing challenges. Let’s use it to become more human, not less.
And never forget: the future needs you today.
Thank you, Karen Palmer.
The comments of Karen Palmer are her own and do not necessarily represent the views of Open Text Corporation or its employees.
Success in Application Delivery Management (ADM) hinges on the ability to adapt to evolving technologies and methodologies. As we get into the swing of things in 2024, three key strategies emerge as essential for thriving in this area: embracing automation, prioritizing performance monitoring, and cultivating a culture of collaboration. Let’s dive into each of these tips and explore how they can empower you, as an ADM leader, to excel in the year ahead.
What are your predictions for application delivery in 2024?
In application delivery, automation serves as a force multiplier that can enable you to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation. By leveraging automation tools and frameworks, your team can automate repetitive tasks such as code deployment, testing, and infrastructure provisioning, freeing up valuable time and resources for strategic initiatives.
Automation not only reduces the risk of human error but also accelerates deployment cycles, allowing your team to deliver features and updates to end-users faster. Moreover, automation fosters consistency and repeatability, ensuring that deployments are executed reliably across different environments.
In 2024, the importance of automation in ADM cannot be overstated. Whether it’s through the adoption of CI/CD pipelines, configuration management tools, or infrastructure as code practices, your team must embrace automation as a cornerstone of your ADM strategy to remain competitive in today’s fast-moving digital environment.
2. Prioritize performance monitoring.
In an era where user experience can make or break an application, performance monitoring emerges as a critical aspect of ADM. Your organization must implement robust performance monitoring and management solutions to gain real-time visibility into application performance, identify bottlenecks, and proactively address issues before they impact end-users.
Continuous monitoring allows your ADM team to track key performance metrics such as response time, throughput, and error rates, enabling them to optimize resource utilization and enhance scalability. By detecting and resolving performance issues in real-time, you can ensure a seamless user experience across diverse environments and devices.
Furthermore, performance monitoring provides valuable insights for capacity planning and resource allocation, enabling your team to scale your infrastructure dynamically to meet changing demands. In 2024, prioritizing performance monitoring will be essential if your team plans to deliver high-performing, reliable applications that delight users.
3. Cultivate a culture of collaboration.
Application delivery is an interconnected world, and success relies on the ability to break down silos and foster collaboration across development, operations, and security teams. By cultivating a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility, your team can accelerate time-to-market, improve quality, and mitigate risks effectively.
Embrace cross-functional collaboration and encourage open communication and knowledge sharing across teams. By involving stakeholders from different disciplines early in the development process, you can ensure that applications are designed, deployed, and maintained with security, scalability, and reliability in mind.
Furthermore, fostering a culture of collaboration will enable your team to adapt quickly to changing requirements and market conditions, facilitating agile, iterative development cycles. If you prioritize collaboration, your team will be better equipped to navigate the complexities of ADM and deliver value to your customers more effectively.
Streamline and optimize to deliver better applications faster
Embracing automation, prioritizing performance monitoring, and cultivating a culture of collaboration are essential strategies for success in ADM in 2024. By adopting these principles, you can streamline processes, optimize performance, and drive innovation, empowering your team to deliver exceptional digital experiences to your users and stay ahead of your competition.
HIPAA taught us important lessons on how we interact with healthcare data, but it was a global pandemic that forced us to collectively go to data grad school.
Understanding where data lives and how we interact with this massive amount of information helps to unlock quality of care, interoperability between disparate systems and mitigate downstream information bottlenecks. This ultimately leads to more efficient revenue cycles. Healthcare accounts for an astounding 30% of the world’s data volume – and growing. The sector’s compound annual growth rate is expected to reach 36% by 2025.
The complexity of healthcare data shows no signs of slowing down. It’s no surprise the global healthcare big data and analytics services market is projected to increase to more than $13 billion U.S. dollars by 2025.1
Disconnected systems and siloed data keep most healthcare organizations from optimizing patient engagement. By connecting information to drive more informed and comprehensive health and wellness lifestyles, healthcare providers can offer effective and engaging digital experiences that align with patient preferences and move patients towards improved outcomes.
With more patient care moving from in-person to digital, it is important to create consistent and comfortable experiences for providers and patients across the continuum of care. But patient and organizational data is rarely integrated and accessible enough to drive intelligent, personalized and efficient digital services, which is affecting retention and loyalty. The same is true among healthcare payers, as they try to improve member experience and reduce churn. While content is abundant, organizations struggle to turn existing information into actionable data to drive patient engagement and desired outcomes.
A world-class digital experience is a priority for every health organization focused on embracing new digital patient engagement strategies which lower the cost of care, increase healthcare quality, and improve patient experience and member engagement. Healthcare organizations are trying to help individuals move towards a more informed and comprehensive health and wellness lifestyle and are helping to manage individual health challenges with informed and inspiring communications. A member 360 view supports content and context to communications that create intelligent, personalized experiences, catered directly to the individual to improve understanding, adherence, and impact.
Data is at the root of all patient experiences – in fact, it’s what separates the extraordinary from the ordinary. I’m thrilled to be attending the Healthcare Information Management System Society (HIMSS) conference to dive into this topic in a Breakfast Briefing on March 12 at 7:15AM in Room 203C.
Start your day with us as we delve into understanding the systems where data lives and leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to unlock and access data across the healthcare continuum. I’ll be joined by two leading healthcare organizations: Beth Israel Lahey Health and National Healthcare Group of Singapore for an engaging discussion about how they’re leveraging data to deliver world-class care. Beth Israel Lahey will also share some lessons learned around efficient access to data and how it helped improve utilization of their EPIC EMR system.
Gain insights to up-level patient experience
Save your spot – register now for the breakfast briefing for insights on how to uplift your healthcare operations and set the tone for an impactful day at HIMSS 24.
Statista, Global big data healthcare analytics market size by application 2016 & 2025.
